It’s not Web 2.0 — it’s just the Web

Peter Rip, the venture capitalist and blogger whose point of view carries a fair bit of weight (at least with me), has a post that is getting a fair bit of commentary going on Techmeme, which he says that Web 2.0 is over, done (and possibly overdone as well), has…

Peter Rip, the venture capitalist and blogger whose point of view carries a fair bit of weight (at least with me), has a post that is getting a fair bit of commentary going on Techmeme, which he says that Web 2.0 is over, done (and possibly overdone as well), has jumped the shark, is finished, kaput, history, etc.

I would definitely agree that the buzzword Web 2.0 is getting long in the tooth, and he makes it clear it’s the buzzword he thinks has outlived its usefulness, not the concept of interactivity, or agile Web-based services. I’m not sure the Alexa charts he uses — which show a decline in traffic to TechCrunch, Gigaom and Technorati — are that persuasive, mostly because I think Alexa is fatally flawed, but the point is still well taken.

Update:

Valleywag has more on the Alexa issue here, and Mike Arrington points out that his traffic has just kept going up, which kind of undermines Peter’s thesis somewhat.

Peter also notes (as does Mark Evans here) that what we need now is more innovation when it comes to helping all the sites and services we have work better together, so that each one is no longer an island. The easy work has been done — the Ajaxification of everything, the rounded corners and pastel colours, the logo with the missing vowels, not to mention the cheap storage and server space provided by Amazon’s s3 and ec2.

Paul Kedrosky rightly says that we need to focus on what is changing and what it means, not on marketing mumbo-jumbo. And whenever I hear the term Web 2.0 now, I think of Tim Berners-Lee’s response last year, in which he argued that the kinds of interactivity most people mean when they use the phrase are just the Web, period — not one-point-this or two-point-that.

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I'm a Toronto-based writer, and this is where I write about online media, technology and other interesting things I come across on the Web. I am a former senior writer at Gigaom, a former blogger, columnist, reporter and social-media editor at the Globe and Mail and a former writer with the Financial Times of Canada.